BPC’s bold five-year strategy to triple revenue

The Botswana Power Corporation (BPC), the state-owned utility that has long shouldered the burden of powering this southern African nation, on Wednesday unveiled its most ambitious blueprint in years – a five-year strategy it calls Atlega.

If the name suggests audacity, the numbers back it up. The corporation, which currently pulls in roughly 9 billion pula in annual revenue, told a hall of stakeholders, government officials and industry executives gathered here in the capital that it intends to more than triple that figure to 25 billion pula by the end of 2031 – a jump of nearly 180 percent that would fundamentally reshape the financial architecture of one of Botswana’s most critical state enterprises.

The announcement, made at a morning launch event that also served as a showcase of the utility’s recent quality-management milestones, represents the latest and perhaps most consequential chapter in BPC’s yearslong effort to reinvent itself. For an organization that has at times grappled with aging infrastructure, tariff shortfalls and the persistent challenge of supplying reliable electricity across a vast and sparsely populated country, Atlega is nothing less than a declaration of intent: Botswana’s power company intends to stand on its own.

“We are not simply managing decline,” Onkgopotse Ramohube, BPC’s acting manager for strategy and transformation, said in an interview after the launch. “We are building for growth.”

A strategy built on four pillars

At its core, Atlega rests on four interlocking ambitions: strengthening financial discipline, improving operational efficiency, optimizing existing resources and diversifying revenue streams. None is exactly novel in the world of utility management; all are familiar refrains in corporate turnarounds the world over. But BPC officials insisted on Wednesday that the difference this time lies in the specificity and the scale of the commitments.

The push for financial discipline, for instance, is not merely a call for belt-tightening. It involves a comprehensive overhaul of how the corporation accounts for costs, prices its electricity and collects what it is owed – a particularly pointed issue in a country where government departments and state-owned enterprises have historically been slow to pay their power bills. BPC has in recent years carried significant receivables on its books, a drag on liquidity that has at times forced the utility to rely on government subventions to stay afloat.

Efficiency gains, meanwhile, are expected to come from a combination of technological upgrades and process redesigns across BPC’s generation, transmission and distribution operations. The corporation has already been working to reduce system losses, the gap between the electricity it generates and the electricity for which it actually gets paid, a figure that has historically hovered in the double digits as a percentage of output.

Resource optimization speaks to BPC’s existing asset base: its coal-fired Morupule power station, its network of substations and transmission lines, its growing portfolio of solar installations. The strategy envisions squeezing more value out of what BPC already owns before asking the treasury for capital to build something new.

But it is the fourth pillar, revenue diversification, that carries the most intrigue and perhaps the most risk. Ramohube, in his remarks at the launch, made clear that the 9-billion-to-25-billion-pula leap cannot be achieved through electricity sales alone.

“The ambition to grow BPC from approximately 9 billion to 25 billion pula will require us to identify new sources of value, strengthen our existing businesses and explore innovative energy solutions, partnerships and opportunities,” he told the audience. “Financial resilience will enable us to invest, grow and sustain the organization well into the future.”

Exactly what those new sources of value might look like remains, for now, something of an open question. BPC officials hinted at possibilities that ranged from expanding into telecommunications infrastructure; leveraging its existing network of towers and fiber-optic cables; to offering energy-as-a-service products for Botswana’s growing mining sector, to potentially exporting surplus power to neighboring countries in the Southern African Power Pool. Each carries its own regulatory, technical and competitive complexities.

The ISO Certifications: A signal of credibility

If Atlega was the morning’s headline, a secondary announcement served as a carefully choreographed supporting act. BPC also unveiled its certification to two International Organization for Standardization standards – a move that utility executives framed as both a validation of recent reforms and a prerequisite for the kind of institutional trust that Atlega will demand.

The certifications, which BPC said it had earned after rigorous external audits, speak to the corporation’s compliance with globally recognized benchmarks for quality management and, depending on the specific standards awarded, environmental or information-security practices. For a state-owned enterprise in a small economy, Botswana’s population is roughly 2.4 million, such certifications are not merely decorative. They signal to potential international partners, lenders and investors that BPC operates with a degree of rigor and transparency that matches global norms.

That matters because Atlega’s ambitions are unlikely to be bankrolled by Botswana’s government alone. The strategy’s capital requirements, which include not only new generation capacity but also the modernization of a grid that serves communities spread across a country the size of France, will almost certainly require the corporation to tap private capital, development-finance institutions or both. ISO certification, in that context, is a kind of institutional passport: evidence that BPC speaks the language that global financiers expect to hear.

A Broader Energy Transition Looms

Atlega does not exist in a vacuum. The strategy arrives at a moment of profound transition in the global energy landscape, and Botswana is no exception.

For decades, the country’s power story has been inseparable from its coal story. The Morupule coal fields, in the eastern part of the country, have fueled both BPC’s generation fleet and Botswana’s broader economic engine. Coal accounts for the overwhelming majority of the nation’s installed capacity, a fact that has placed Botswana among the world’s most carbon-intensive electricity systems on a per-capita basis.

But the ground is shifting. International pressure to decarbonize – driven by climate agreements, evolving lending criteria at major development banks and the declining cost of renewable energy – has made it increasingly difficult for coal-dependent utilities to chart a future that looks like their past. Botswana has already begun to feel these forces: several major development-finance institutions have tightened their lending policies around new coal projects, and the country’s own National Energy Policy has set ambitious targets for renewable-energy capacity.

Atlega, BPC officials said, is designed to navigate that transition without abandoning the assets that currently keep the lights on. The strategy envisions a diversified generation mix – one in which solar, and potentially other renewables, claim a growing share of the portfolio while existing coal plants continue to provide baseload power during the transition. It is a balancing act that utilities around the world are attempting, with mixed results.

Botswana’s abundant sunshine, among the highest solar-irradiation levels on the planet, gives it a natural advantage in the renewable-energy race. Several large-scale solar projects are already in various stages of development across the country, and BPC has signaled that it intends to be a significant player in that build-out, whether as a developer, a buyer or a partner.

The Stakes for Botswana

The importance of BPC’s success extends well beyond the corporation’s own balance sheet. Electricity is the sinew of Botswana’s economy, powering the diamond mines that generate the bulk of government revenue, the smelters that process the country’s mineral wealth and the small and medium enterprises that represent the government’s best hope for diversifying an economy that remains perilously dependent on a single commodity.

When BPC struggles, Botswana struggles. Power outages, which have periodically darkened parts of the country during periods of supply constraint, carry immediate economic costs: interrupted production, spoiled inventory, lost hours. They also carry reputational costs, sending an unwelcome signal to the foreign investors that Botswana has long courted as a hedge against diamond-industry volatility.

Conversely, a financially robust and operationally reliable BPC would be a powerful tailwind for the country’s broader development ambitions. Affordable and dependable electricity lowers the cost of doing business, improves the quality of life for ordinary citizens and enables the kind of industrial activity, in agro-processing, in manufacturing, in digital services, that Botswana’s policymakers have talked about fostering for years.

It is against that backdrop that Atlega’s revenue target takes on its full significance. The 25-billion-pula figure is not arbitrary; BPC officials said it represents the level of financial strength necessary to fund the corporation’s capital program without the kind of recurring government bailouts that have characterized its recent history. In other words, it is the price of independence.

Skepticism and Questions

For all its ambition, Atlega is likely to face its share of skeptics. BPC has announced strategic plans before, and not all of their promises have been fulfilled. The utility’s history includes missed generation targets, cost overruns at Morupule and periods when the gap between the utility’s tariff structure and its actual cost of supply grew so wide that only government transfers could close it.

Achieving a 180-percent revenue increase in five years would be a formidable challenge for any organization, let alone a state-owned utility operating in a small, open economy vulnerable to commodity-price swings and regional energy dynamics. The strategy assumes, among other things, that Botswana’s economy will continue to grow, that demand for electricity will rise accordingly, that new revenue streams can be identified and captured at scale, and that the institutional discipline required to hold the line on costs and collections will prove durable.

Each of those assumptions carries risk. Diamond demand – the engine of Botswana’s economy – is subject to the vagaries of global consumer sentiment and the slow but unmistakable shift toward lab-grown stones. Regional electricity trade, while promising, depends on the cooperation and reliability of neighbors whose own utilities face their own financial and operational strains. And institutional reform, as anyone who has watched a state-owned enterprise attempt a turnaround can attest, is easier to announce than to sustain.

Ramohube, for his part, acknowledged the scale of the challenge but said the organization was prepared for it. “This is not a strategy built on wishful thinking,” he said. “It is built on rigorous analysis, clear priorities and – most importantly – the commitment of the people who will have to execute it.”

The Road Ahead

The launch of Atlega marks a beginning, not an end. In the months ahead, BPC will need to translate the strategy’s broad ambitions into detailed implementation plans, assign clear accountabilities and establish the monitoring and evaluation mechanisms that will determine whether the 25-billion-pula target remains a north star or becomes an asterisk.

The corporation will also need to manage the political dimensions of its transformation. Tariff adjustments, an almost inevitable consequence of the push for financial sustainability, are politically sensitive in any country, and Botswana is no exception. Any move to raise electricity prices, even if justified by cost-recovery principles, will invite scrutiny from consumers, businesses and the politicians who answer to them.

Then there is the question of leadership. Ramohube, who presented Atlega on Wednesday, holds his position in an acting capacity. The strategy’s success will depend in no small part on whether BPC’s leadership team – whatever its final composition – can maintain the focus and cohesion required to see a five-year plan through the inevitable setbacks and surprises that lie ahead.

For now, though, the mood at Wednesday’s launch was one of cautious optimism. BPC’s leaders spoke with the confidence of executives who believe they have a plan worth believing in. The ISO certifications on display offered tangible evidence that the organization can meet global standards when it sets its mind to it. And the strategy’s very name – Atlega, greatness – served as a reminder that Botswana’s aspirations for its power company, and for itself, have always been larger than the challenges it faces.

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